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The Philosophy of Information for Everyone
The Intuitive Observer as Fully Human Objection 1: The false dilemma of a dire choice between “Authority” and “Technology” has been posed many times throughout history, at least as far back as Socrates’ objection to the written record of philosophical argumentation in the Dialogues. More recently, this dilemma has been evaded, to the detriment of technology, in _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ by Robert M. Pirsig. While Pirsig avoids actually defaming technology, Ted Kaczynski directly defames the value of technology in favor of Authority in general and his own authority in particular. In an exceptional display of cowardice, Kaczynski justifies his own use of brute force and violence upon those who wield the constructive and non-exclusive power of Technology, while retreating from the naturally disastrous consequences of attacking those who wield the destructive and jealously guarded power of Authority. Objection 2: Following directly from the first objection, as Authority, Privilege, Legitimacy, and Pedagogy are defined by those who supposedly possess the necessary elements and qualifications of a Privileged Experiential Stance, the rest of us are unprivileged observers of our own existence, whether of our environs, our Society, or worse, even of ourselves. Which brings us to The Philosophy of Information by Luciano Floridi Objection 3: Floridi (2011) uses his considerable philosophical insight to elude the discussion of Privileged Stance entirely, making it an implicit function that runs throughout his entire discussion of Levels of Abstraction (Domains), Gradients of Abstraction (Traverses, Dimensions), Levels of Organization (Self-Organized Complexity), and Levels of Explanation (a Linguistic Domain which interacts in multiple Dimensions with several other Domains). While I have no objections to the use of these concepts, as given by Floridi, to be used in questions of awareness of the Self (where the Privileged Stance has strong implications for Character, Moral Responsibility, and Self-Determination), I object strenuously to their being used as the bases of Standards of Knowledge, Competence, and Expertise in any fields to be learned by members of the public at large; they are entirely inappropriate to public rather than private standards. Objection 4: I see an implicit but not explicit place in Levels of Abstraction for the Artistic and Poetic functions of the Human intellect; not literature (divided into the Privileged “Non-Fiction”, and the unprivileged “Fiction”), nor for poetic expression, nor for “poetic” expressions such as Analogy and Metaphor. The Privileged Stance conquers everything around it, devaluing “richness” of detail, and “depth” of complexity. Objection 5: In the works of Floridi (2011) and Dennet (1991), the existence of a Privileged Stance is consistently and implicitly presumed, but never explicitly examined. For example, in Floridi, there are Levels of Abstraction which seem to arise through spontaneous reproduction, rather than through the actions of an Abstractor, who is nowhere to be seen. Such an Abstractor must be in direct relation to the Observables and the LoAs, and further these Observables are selected from some larger Domain without the Observer anywhere in evidence. It seems to me that the Observables exist in a relationship to an Observer within a larger Domain common to them both, and that LoA (Domains marked by forming a system of related Traverses) come to be produced between the Observer and the Observables, to produce a central Dimension of Representation which is continuous throughout, and satisfies the Observer as to the soundness of the system of representation, made in smaller and more immediately verifiable steps (Traverses). Objection 6: It is within a System of Privileged Stance, Objective Observers, Objectively selected Observables, Objective Abstractions, and all their converse functions (Unprivileged Stances, Subjective….) that we find the most difficulty in conveying the Abstractions produced to any other Observer in a way that possesses any but the least persuasive power. For example, in one of the most pervasive, and therefore persuasive Domains available to us (Domain O), we have the features of the Permanence (OP) and the Solidity of Objects (OS). In contrast to this Domain, we have a far less immediate, but no less rationally justified Domain (Domain P), in which Objects are considered as Clouds of Particles (CP), and are considered to be mostly empty space (ES). There is a great cognitive gap between these two Domains (too often remarked upon to require citation), and the reason that no person has ever been required to authentically account for this gap is that it has consistently been compulsory to simply accept this gap at face value, or to be omitted from any serious discussion of the subject. The gap between Domain O and P is inordinately simple however: they lie along a continuous, qualitative, and quantitative Dimension, Precision of Measurement (PM). In Domain O, the Instrumentality with which the objects are observed is rudimentary in comparison to the Instrumentalities which produce Domain P. Following the work of Tegmark, and Everett before him, the imprecise measurement of an object must leave only the slightest decoherence of the particle, leaving the vast majority of the wave-function essentially unaltered: the solidity of the object is not a function of its particles, but a function, a physical property, of its wave-functions! This tentative conclusion is something that I can own as an abstraction all my own, and founded upon the hard work of other observers. Held as being entirely subjective, and subject to the analysis and criticism of others, privileged or unprivileged, it can be conveyed persuasively, rather than by sheer Fiat. Similarly, once we entirely rid ourselves of the "Objective" ("given to Moses by God Himself") Privileged Stance, we can ask any question at all, without fear of being silenced or shunned; questions such as “In which direction of Time does a positron convey information? Can it be subjectively held to be both positively charged, and anti-temporal, simultaneously, or are the two subjective positions held to be mutually exclusive? If a photon and its anti-particle are both photons, why shouldn’t the two-slit experiment produce interference patterns? Should we subjectively hold that the anti-photon is also anti-temporal, or that it produces alternate histories of the events of the photon that we observe?”. Objection 7: I have not as yet finished reading Floridi (2011), but I have yet to see any mention of Physical Information. “Curiouser and curiouser.” You'll pardon me while I take a break and enjoy my Blonde with a Black Eye here at Starbucks. Ample bandwidth, worthy of my Towering Intellect P;D courtesy of Starbucks and Google. Thanks bunches. I'm back! Having read even more (but still not all) of Floridi(2011), I actually think that he's done an excellent job of explaining burning issues in Semantics and Semiotics to others that are similarly interested, but for anyone wishing to apply this body of theory to either their own field of expertise, or to life in general, the results seem to range anywhere from interesting but uninformative, to counter-intuitive and seemingly ineffective. While someone else entirely could popularize the content of this work and similar ones, I suspect that what came out the other end would hardly be as rigorous, which is a shame. I could write such a work, given the abundance of resources, but I fundamentally disagree with most of what I've seen here, principally because I think that not only the tone but the content must at least address other fields of expertise, if not informal life. It's one thing to present one's own field as "Objective" and "Privileged" in comparison to fast and easy informal thinking (vastly misunderstood as a flat pancake, rather than a bell curve), but it's quite another to maintain the same position against all other formal studies as well. That sounds a bit like a game of "Clue" in an Ivory Tower. "Here we are at Camp Crystal Lake! Have fun, kids! Play nice!" Read this book, but stay out of the basement, and don't split up either. P;D Category:Philosophy for Everyone Category:School of Hard Knocks